title: [How does our specialty present itself on the Internet?].
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The huge amount of information on the internet about orthopaedic and trauma surgical issues is very often unclear and hard to control in reliability, autonomy and expertise. The aim of this work is to evaluate German-speaking internet sites with orthopaedic and trauma surgical contents.
  
  
  METHODS
  Over a period of two months (from May to June) in 2012 different websites about 20 common orthopaedic and trauma surgical diseases were analysed on the internet by Google search engine. The first ten search results were evaluated for the HON code principles (Health On the Net Foundation). Furthermore there was an evaluation about qualification of the first 50 websites. The best 1,000 placed websites on Google were analysed for the authoritative value: academic, commercial, media, non-medical, physicians, non-profit and miscellaneous.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Only 194 from 200 websites could be evaluated by the HON code principles. Overall 188 websites complied the principle of transparency, followed by privacy with 150 sites and authoritative with 134 sites. Only 90 websites give information about financial disclosure. Medical articles of the website Wikipedia appear most frequently. In the second part of this work it is shown that non-profit sites and sites by physicians are the most frequent. The fewest results are given by academic and commercial sites with 93 and 85 online hits.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  In summary, it is shown that most of the websites about medical information have inadequate quality. This statement is in accord with some U. S. American publications. It is clear that Wikipedia has a top-ranking on the internet when it is about medical information. Wikipedia almost achieves all of the HON code principles. It is possible to give better medical online information about orthopaedic and trauma surgical issues published by professionals.
authors.affiliation: Abteilung für Orthopädie und Unfallchirurgie, Evangelische Elisabeth Klinik, Berlin. u.rechenberg@web.de
authors.forename: U
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Rechenberg
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Josten
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Grüner
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Klima
mesh_terms: D057220:Health Literacy / Q000592:standards / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination / Q000379:methods*; D038622:Internationality; D020407:Internet / Q000592:standards / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D007592:Joint Diseases; D009985:Orthopedics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011786:Quality Control; D014194:Traumatology / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*